Gladiator - Film Review by Liz Greene

The opening sequences of Gladiator, with their violence, cruelty, and
display of the might of a ruthless war machine, may well seem shocking
and offensive, not to mention glaringly politically incorrect, to
an astrologer more concerned with spiritual and psychological development.
Films such as What Dreams May Come might seem far more suitable viewing.
Where, one may well ask, is the spirituality, let alone ordinary human
compassion, in a Roman commanding officer whose objective is the utter
destruction of a recalcitrant tribe?

The figure of the Roman general
Maximus, played by the delicious Russell Crowe, is distilled
essence of Mars. Russell Crowe has the Sun in Aries,
of course.

This film, whose
visual magnificence is tainted with a simplistic script and a characteristic
Hollywood laissez-faire about the facts of history, is nevertheless
a remarkable portrayal of a particular kind of spiritual fervour
- the passion of the war-god, whose divine inebriation once sent
the Norse berserker invincible into battle and catapulted a small
tribe of Italic natives into supremacy over the whole of the known
world. We might do well, as astrologers, to understand the enduring
attractions of the war-god, for in an epoch when war has demonstrated
its more horrifically Plutonian face and lost the nobility and honour
which were once essentially part of Mars' array of attributes,
we have lost our comprehension of why some people love to fight.
Myth can teach us a great deal about the divine nature of prowess
and honour in battle; the Norse Valhalla and the Elysian Fields
of the Greeks are only two examples which bear testimony to the
afterlife rewards which lie in store for those who live and die
honourably by the sword. Figures like Napoleon and Alexander continue
to hold a powerful fascination for those who seek a human model
for an archetypal pattern once deemed to be a god. Gladiator can
teach us a lot about this god; and despite its Hollywood pyrotechnics
and unabashed sentimentality, it may also help us to understand
why those whose birth charts are Mars-dominated need to honour what
they are made of, and find constructive outlets for it, rather than
being made to feel they are bad, unspiritual, or "unevolved".

The figure of
the Roman general Maximus, played by the delicious Russell Crowe,
is distilled essence of Mars. He is manly and beautiful. His physical
body is an expression of the energy and instinctive grace of a deity
born not of the upper ethers of the sky-gods but of the dark blood-flow
of the chthonic realm. He is not afflicted with the need to display
gratuitous cruelty; that is the emblem of a blocked or twisted Mars,
not a healthy one. He lives to serve his empire and his god, and
his honour is worth more than his life. He is passionate, devoted,
fearless, honest, and loyal. He is also a realist; he does not whinge
and whine about the spiritually superior merits of pacifism when
faced with the stark necessity
of winning or dying. In a time when we are virtually muzzled by
the collective idealisations of Neptune in Aquarius, Maximus is
refreshingly unhypocritical. Even the eye-for-an-eye principle of
revenge, also part of Mars' nature but so un-Christian and unfashionable
these days, is portrayed here as noble. That is undoubtedly part
of the film's enormous popularity: it presents us with emotions
we secretly feel but are afraid to articulate. Maximus is not stupid
enough to think war is anything other than a brutal necessity. But
he chooses to fight with discipline, clarity, nobility, and skill.
This is the "night side" of Mars with its Scorpionic devotion
and self-disciopline, reflected by the Sephira Geburah in that other
great symbolic system, the Kabalah. Here too, Mars is recognised
as a divine principle, not a random display of destructiveness and
chaos.

The film's "feminine
interest", as it is euphemistically known in Hollywood, is
token. Maximus' Spanish wife, and Lucilla, the Roman princess to
whom he is passionately attracted, are both stereotypes. It is a
man's film, which is not to say it cannot be thoroughly enjoyed
and appreciated by women. The relations between Maximus and Commodus,
the cowardly, neurotic and deeply damaged young Emperor, are far
more important, and hint at (perhaps inadvertently, but nevertheless
suggestively) a profound human issue concerning the distortions
of Mars. Commodus is, at least in the film (although not in historical
reality), a rejected son. While the script is not overburdened with
psychological sophistication, nevertheless this figure is common
enough in everyday life - the young man who is a disappointment
to his father and who, rather than fulfilling the strengths of his
own nature, settles into a good nasty seethe about those whom his
father loves more. Commodus hates Maximus because Maximus has the
qualities the old Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, would have wanted in
a son. Commodus is not a warrior, and he knows it; he is sensitive
and indolent rather than brave, sensuous and self-indulgent rather
than disciplined. So he begins to hate. He is eaten up with jealousy,
and this turns him destructive. We may see this dynamic at work
in many families, between father and son and also between mother
and daughter. When Mars is not expressed constructively, with honour
and respect, it may turn poisonous and emerges as a kind of cowardly
cruelty and malice aimed at undermining all those who trigger the
individualís sense of impotence. Many instances of child
abuse and domestic violence owe their existence to just such a dynamic.
In its simplistic way, the relationship between these two male figures
in the film gives us a succinct image of how destructive envy arises,
and how it can so easily slide into unmitigated evil. Although the
film does not purport to be either deeply philosophical or deeply
insightful into human character - it is, after all, a Hollywood
spectacular - it can, nevertheless, make us think philosophically
about the nature of evil, the roots of violence, and the undeniable
magic and mystery of a clean and shining Mars reflecting the divinity
of the archetypal warrior.

In some ways,
the second half of the film could be dispensed with, because the
plot loses its way and the script becomes increasingly trite and
simplistic. This film is not a work of art. Yet the filming of the
great battle sequence between the Roman army, with Maximus as its
commander, and the Germanic tribes who "refuse to admit they
have been conquered", is a cinematic masterpiece. At the end
of the film, when Commodus is finally killed by Maximus in the arena
and the Senate implies that the Roman Republic will be restored,
those of us who respect sound historical research may fall about
laughing. The Roman people in the 2nd century CE were
not remotely interested in the restoration of the Republic, and
this anachronistic plug for an essentially modern concept of democracy
is utterly absurd. Commodus was in fact murdered by a slave called
Narcissus, and rather than inaugurating the dawn of a new republic,
the murder of the Emperor simply ushered in the rule of yet another
Emperor. The American movie-making machine, with a little help from
Mel Gibson, seems intent on turning historical fact into sentimental
proselytising. But the performances in Gladiator are convincing,
and the recreation of the Roman world, Mars-imbued and steeped in
glory, is vivid and realistic. There are many kinds of war and many
kinds of heroism; and if we are fortunate enough to live in a culture
which has, albeit only recently, begun to work out what a bad idea
it is to rush blindly into battle, we may still exercise the unique
spirituality of Mars through battle with our own inner demons as
well as the demons unleashed around us, and still maintain the courage
and loyalty which allow us to live our lives with honour. The football
hooligan and the lager lout, the conscienceless mercenary and the
corrupt dictator, are deformed Mars, not Mars parading in his full
beauty and potency. Rather than less Mars, we may need more. Deity
without Mars means a castrated deity which deprives us of our capacity
to maintain our integrity; then we run the risk of becoming horribly
similar to Commodus, in thought and feeling if not in actual deed.
Gladiator, although no doubt too violent for the tastes of many
film-goers, too simplistic for the intellectually-minded, and perhaps
too overtly and spectacularly brutish for the refined sensibilities
of many spiritual souls, can make us question some very fundamental
issues we ordinarily take for granted. Every planet has its own
form of spirituality as well as its own form of baseness and destructiveness.
The next time we interpret Mars in a birth chart, we might do well
to think of Maximus.

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